Board Optimization - United-Forum CSS Sprites - ludicrous speed - NOW!

tl;dr Makes your forum faster.

Want an easy one-click installation for this addon? . Vote for this jira-entry

Add on currently is in beta stage

When visiting a website, speed is a very important factor not only for users but crawlers as well. Long loading times are a nuisance since your time is basically wasted during the waiting period. Hence, we are trying everything we can in order to speed up our site. One great way to improve loading times is by the use of css sprites. Unfortunately these are not implemented by vBulletin.

We therefore decided to develop our own css-sprite add on for vBulletin boards and want to share this code with the worldwide vBulletin community.

Live demo

The add on is permanently running in our vBulletin board ( > 2.000.000 posts), take a look:
http://www.united-forum.de

The add on will be supported via this thread. If you have any questions, issues, improvements or feedback regarding this add on, please feel free to post a comment or write us a pm at any time. We are happy to discuss

vBulletin performance using css sprites

Our tests are based on version 0.7.0. We used the analytic tools firebug network utility and the googlelabs.com page speed site

on the client side the following parameter were used:
download speed: 5.7 MBit/s
ping: 31ms

css sprites - what are they?

The intention behind css sprites is the bundling of many small graphics into one large graphic in order to decrease the number of required http requests. This shortens the loading times of the given website. In addition, the the accumulated size of all small graphics is higher than the size of the sprite due to reasons of compression.
You can find further information in a great article by Chris Coyier.

What is the gain in using css sprites?

Aside from the technical implementation, the question on how much one actually does gain by using css sprites is of the most interest. Obviously they decrease loading times - but how important are small loading times and what is the impact on vBulletin overall loading times?

A short time ago, Jasper Aguila pointed out that speed is one crucial stickiness factor in his blog on vBulletin.com.

Originally Posted by Jasper Aguila vBulletin Support

The internet has unfortunately contributed to the exponential decrease in attention span for many individuals. That's why this decade is seeing a trend in emerging technologies emphasizing the importance of speed request. It's crucial for your content to be promptly distributed in a timely manner, else bounce rate will increase - making you lose returning visitors. It's also important to note that slow sites may be penalized by search engines.

With better browsers, more powerful processors, and improved technologies constantly releasing each year, it's becoming quite difficult to provide excuses for slow loading pages. Therefore, try optimizing your server for speed. Read up and learn optimization techniques at vBulletin.com's Server Configuration forum.

In addition, the google ranking is influenced by the site speed as well.

Google Webmaster Central Blog

Originally Posted by 09.04.2010 - Google Webmaster Central Blog

You may have heard that here at Google we're obsessed with speed, in our products and on the web. As part of that effort, today we're including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.

vBseo Webmaster Mert G?k?eimam

CSS sprites is a huge bonus for big boards , any big board owner definately should use it.

Last but not least, not only the user's loading time is reduced, but also does the server load decrease as the server will have to handle a lot less of http requests. This clears available connections and cpu time.

Add on features

In the current released beta version 0.7.2, sprites are available for FORUMHOME and FORUMDISPLAY. Coming up next SHOWTHREAD.

Sprites are created style based for all forum styles and saved in a folder which you can set via the imgdir_sprite stylevar. You have one additional button in the ACP (CSS-Sprites -> Refresh) which automatically creates all sprites, the according css definitions and includes those css definitions in the vBulletin css rollup files.

Installation

First of all, if you didnt want to change the templates manually, install the Template Modification System (TMS). Now proceed with the installation:

• upload the contents of the upload folder into your forum home directory.
• import the add on in the ACP
• upon installation a new stylevar imgdir_sprite will be created. Update this stylevar based on your file structure - default value is the vbulletin sprite directory. Make sure the folder is writable, else the sprites can't be saved!
• create the sprites via the ACP at CSS-Sprite using the Refresh option.
• If you have installed TMS, you are done now. This was an easy gained speed up, not? If you didnt installed TMS and didnt want to do it, proceed with the next point:
• in order to use the sprites, you then will have to edit some templates. The diffs (xou will find it in the do_not_upload folder show which parts you have to delete '<' and which parts to add '>' In addition, on top find the lines in which you will find the respective code.[/b]

[Mooff]

Output does look fine.
Since you left your url in i checked the main sprite - and it does look fine aswell (aside the GD 2.0.35 version - guys please update, that version is 4 years old).
So what exactly is not working?
Did you do the required template changes?

[stephen1976]

okay installed on 4.1.5 PL1

there is only one slight error the Paperclip icon on threads now appears a little odd ( i think it now stands out more! )

see pic

[Mooff]

We will update the FAQ with that question soon. Really shocked it does affect so many servers.

Originally Posted by Osbes

If you have some image like

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin.png

which looks like

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/246391/Robin_result.png

in the Sprite (it is stretched and vertical lines are added), than you possible use a GD Libary older than 2.0.36.

GD had a problem handling grayscale images with alpha channel correctly, wich was fixed with GD 2.0.36 in the Year 2007.

https://bitbucket.org/pierrejoye/gd-...361a31aab/NEWS

The solution is to update the GD-Libary to 2.0.36 (or later) or replace every file which uses "gray+alpha" with an version using "color RGBA".

I would advise to update the GD-Libary, cause there is also a serious security problem, that was fixed in the Year 2009 by Debian.



I am totally shocked by this, since there seem to be a whole bunch of people with this kind of problem and this fix is 4 years old and since 2 years known als high security fix by debian.
So there seems to be a lot problem within the maintenance of servers, if some serious security issue isnt solved since 2-4 years. If you pay money for server maintenance i would be deeply shocked, if i were you.

Best regards
Sebastian

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by Mooff

We will update the FAQ with that question soon. Really shocked it does affect so many servers.

I'm not, most hosts get by on the bare minimums, overloading shared hosting boxes and the like. Having 4 year outdated image libraries with a security hole sounds just right.

[sadiq6210]

Could you explain this step more?

upon installation a new stylevar imgdir_sprite will be created. Update this stylevar based on your file structure - default value is the vbulletin sprite directory. Make sure the folder is writable, else the sprites can't be saved!

[Crotan]

Originally Posted by sadiq6210

Could you explain this step more?

Look in the style Manager in the admincp, installing this mod will create a new stylevar named "imgdir_sprite" Make sure the folder is chmod 755, is what it means by make sure it's writable so that vbulletin can save the new sprite images it creates.

[giorgino]

One strange issue: "Moved" topic hasn't icons

[Osbes]

Hello,

version 0.7.2 is currently running on our liveforum. If nothing wrong happens, i will release it tomorrow.

Best regards
Sebastian

[fukdawrld]

Thanks for all your help. It built the sprites.

[Osbes]

Hello giorgino,

thanks for the info, i missed to integrate the following template change within the TMS rules.

Template: threadlist.css
<    .threadbit.moved .threadstatus { background-image: url({vb:stylevar imgdir_statusicon}/thread_moved-30.png); }

I have integrated it to 0.7.2.

If you didnt want to wait, you can remove the css-rule .threadbit.moved .threadstatusfrom within the template threadlist.css manually.

Best regards
Sebastian